Introduction

In the twentieth century, each major philosophical current has possessed its own Leibniz. There has been an appropriation from the perspective of logic in the works of Bertrand Russell (1900) and Louis Couturat (1901), an epistemological appropriation in the works of neo-Kantians such as Ernst Cassirer (1902), and a phenomenological appropriation in the works of Edmund Husserl (1931) and Dietrich Mahnke (1917). None of these philosophical appropriations, however, were interested in the variety, complexity, and richness of Leibniz’s philosophy for its own sake, contenting themselves rather with reducing it to a handful of metaphysical doctrines. More recently, however, continuing the early work of mainly French scholars such as Yvon Belaval (1960) and Martial Gueroult (1967), there has been a tremendous boom in Leibniz studies with authors taking a less philosophical and more historiographical approach. Like Kantian philosophy, the entire Leibnizian system is now being taken seriously as a crucial moment in the development of modern philosophy.